1.5 Trusted My Site Host Locations
SharePoint deployments with
geographically distributed farms can have multiple User Profile Service
Applications, and subsequently multiple My Site host locations. Recall
from earlier that only a single My Site host can be configured per User
Profile Service Application. Also, you need to prevent a user from
creating more than one My Site when multiple User Profile Service
Applications exist, which they can do by default. Trusted My Site host
locations provide this capability, and their configuration is optional.
Administrators manage a list of trusted My Site host locations, and
then target each location to the appropriate users.
1.6 Promoted Sites
Promoted sites are links that will
appear on the Sites page in a user’s My Site. Each link that is added
can be targeted to a specific audience or to the default audience of
All Site Users. This enables end users to quickly navigate from their
My Site to other locations that are relevant to them.
The following example demonstrates how promoted
sites can be used to target departmental home pages to users in each
company department. The company, called Contoso, has five major
departments, each with its own SharePoint departmental home page that
is used for team collaboration. Five different audiences have been
created, one for each department; and five personalization site links
have been created, each one a link to the departmental home page, and
targeted to users in the departmental audience.
Follow these steps to set up personalization site links in the User Profile Service Application, per the preceding example:
1. In the My Site Settings section, click Manage Promoted Sites.
2. Click the New Link button.
3. Fill in the URL to the departmental team site.
4. The Description will be the text that is displayed.
5. Add a URL to a image you want displayed, which will be hyperlinked to the promoted site.
6. The owner is a required field, and represents the person responsible for maintaining this link.
7. The Target
Audience in this example is called Marketing, which is comprised of all
users in an Active Directory group called Marketing.
8. Click OK to save the new link. The image and link are added to the Sites website, shown in Figure 5. Follow the preceding steps for each company department.
1.7 Publishing Links to Office Client Applications
The configuration to publish links to
Microsoft Office client applications is conceptually similar to the
personalization site links. The Publish Links to Office Client
Applications setting enables SharePoint links to be pushed out, so that
they are available to end users within the Office applications, such as
Word and Excel. When users have such quick and easy access to open and
save files to common SharePoint locations, their daily work processes
can be even more efficient.
In the My Sites section, click Publish Links to
Office Client Applications. The steps to create a new link are
identical to the personalization site link steps in the previous
section, except for an additional drop-down box to select what type of
item is being published, such as a document library or a team site.
Where does the end user see the published links?
In any Office 2013 application, click the File tab at the top left,
choose the Share tab, and click Save to SharePoint. This section lists
the published links on the right side, which the file can then be saved
to as long as the user has Contribute rights to the library selected.
1.8 Managing Social Tags and Notes
Within the My Site Settings section of
the User Profile Service Application is a setting called Manage Social
Tags and Notes. This feature is provided primarily for SharePoint 2010
sites that have been upgraded, as this functionality has been
deprecated. As shown in Figure 6,
SharePoint 2013 includes a management console for administrators that
enables them to search existing tags and notes, as well as delete
specific ones as needed.
To perform a search for either tags or notes, the
username or URL must be specified. You can narrow down the search
results by specifying a date range or a keyword or both. Click the Find
button to see the results of the query. When the list of results is
displayed, the only action that can be taken is to delete the item.
Only the user who created a note is allowed to edit it.
1.9 Manage Following
This page enables you to change the thresholds for the content and people that a user can follow. Figure 7 shows the three options that you can configure.
It’s a good idea to leave these values
at their default setting unless you have a good reason to change them.
Decreasing the limits to a very low number may prevent users from using
the social features effectively.
